We need different nouns for gender and sex

[AT God]

I think the only change that could benefit the English language at the moment would be a few gender neutral terms. I find it odd we don't have a singular pronoun for a person that doesn't imply a gender. He is male, She is female, it denotes an object, and they doesn't work for a singular person. Seems like a failure.

Only other thing I think that might be open to change in the future is changing how man is both the name for the human species and is also a way of expressing the gender of a person. No idea how we could fix this but I feel like man should ignore gender since it has a more broad meaning as well, but I don't know how it would be fixed.

 

[Queen Michael]

I don't think that'd be a good idea. For one thing, well, if there are two different physical sexes and two basic genders, who decides which gender is male and which one is female? It seems a bit arbitary, in my view. If your gender isn't connected to your physical sex, I see no reason to categorize genders as "male" or "female." (That's why I've got problems with genderfluidness -- I don't like the idea of deciding that your current mood is a "male mood" or a "female mood.") In that case, it's better to just view things the way I do -- that people are physically male or female, and personality-wise we're just people.

 

[Solkard]

Or... just strive for "equality" and not use different nouns for anyone. lol.

 

[inmunitas]

If you really wanted to, why not just use the Japanese honorific suffixes like -chan to imply "feminine" and -kun to imply "masculine"?

Example:
"female-chan"
"male-kun"

 

[Rahkshi500]

Creating new pronouns for men and women isn't the answer; we already have "he" and "she" for them, and it works enough as it is that there's no reason to change them. Trans-men would still identify as men, and as such, would rather be addressed with the pronouns used for men, and vice-versa for trans-women.

Creating new pronouns for people who don't identify as either gender, or are mixed gender, and etc, however, is the answer.

I'm more in favor of having new pronouns for people who don't conform to the binary spectrum of gender. But I think you can already find such new pronouns with a quick google-search; there are lists made for this topic that can be used for a helpful reference or guide. But if you are talking with someone who you don't know their gender identity, especially if it's someone you're talking to online, then using gender-neutral pronouns like "them" or "they" would be safer options until you find out what their gender identity is.

 

[Signa]

It's less of a problem with English itself and more of a problem of interpreting what the other person is saying. So many people act as if offense was intended instead of just figuring out what the persona meant. Changing English like this requires the majority of the population to accept these new definitions for this new words. That doesn't happen easily.

"Male" and "female" is enough to get confused by. Hell, the general population can barely make a conscious choice between republican and democrat. You expect them to make unconscious choices about how they perceive a person beyond the binary male/female assignments? Make that 4 or 5 options, and no one will ever get it right.

 

[wizzy555]

Two things, it's only recently that English stopped using gender and sex as interchangeable.

Also it was only 10 years ago the feminist consensus (if such a thing is possible) was English shouldn't have gendered pronouns at all.

Personally I'd rather eliminate them completely.

 

[Yan007]

If it looks like a He, I call him a he, if it looks like a she I call her a she.

If it just looks like an it, I probably won't be calling it at all.

 

[Dimitriov]

I think the only change that could benefit the English language at the moment would be a few gender neutral terms. I find it odd we don't have a singular pronoun for a person that doesn't imply a gender. He is male, She is female, it denotes an object, and they doesn't work for a singular person. Seems like a failure.

Oh, but we do have a singular gender neutral pronoun: it.

But people don't like to use it for some reason.

 

[DoPo]

I think the only change that could benefit the English language at the moment would be a few gender neutral terms. I find it odd we don't have a singular pronoun for a person that doesn't imply a gender. He is male, She is female, it denotes an object, and they doesn't work for a singular person. Seems like a failure.

Oh, but we do have a singular gender neutral pronoun: it.

But people don't like to use it for some reason.

This is the perfect setup to quote Jerome K. Jerome whose writing I love and I never really had the opportunity to quote

There are various methods by which you may achieve ignominy and shame. By murdering a large and respected family in cold blood and afterward depositing their bodies in the water companies' reservoir, you will gain much unpopularity in the neighborhood of your crime, and even robbing a church will get you cordially disliked, especially by the vicar. But if you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human creature can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

 

[AT God]

Oh, but we do have a singular gender neutral pronoun: it.

But people don't like to use it for some reason.

I mentioned this in my post but in retrospect I can see how you missed it, the word "it" has so many uses I see how you might have missed my mentioning:

it denotes an object,

As I said, I feel that "it" generally denotes an object, it can be used for people but I can understand why people feel weird about that and your confusion about my mentioning also supports why I think we need a new word, "it" can mean too many different things while we literally do not have a word that is a non-gendered singular pronoun. From my own experience, I would like a non-gendered pronoun because I don't like having to guess gender when describing someone. Example: I once ran into an old teacher of mine, I was aware she had recently had a child and wanted to ask her about how the child was doing. I had no idea what the gender of the child, and I felt asking "How is it doing?" is inappropriate because that's also how you would ask if someone's TV is working. I ended up just guessing and asking "How is she doing?" and was luckily right.

I just find the lack of useful words depressing when English has so many synonyms and meaningless words. Not to go into a rant but there are multiple variations of "selfie" but not a single pronoun to describe a human being without specifying gender. That's just stupid in my opinion since new words are added to the dictionary all the time.

To go on a bit more about gender and pronouns (stop reading if you don't want to hear my OPINION on the matter): I feel that instead of expanding and creating more words to describe people, why don't we do the opposite and just make a word that denotes someone as a person and move on? If a friend is telling me a story, I don't need to know what the gender of the people in the story are automatically. If it were important, my friend could say "X is a man/woman/transgender/etc." Lots of people online want more pronouns to describe themselves better but I feel pronouns aren't the place for apt descriptions. And if we did adapt new pronouns for transgendered people, we would be ignoring many other people who technically do not fit in to male or female on at least a biological level (being transgender is actually less common than being born with XXY or X- chromosomes). Instead of creating potentially dozens of pronouns to continue expanding the language, why not just make a universal pronoun that designates someone as human and not "it", and move on. If someone's gender matters to your story, establish it once and then refer to them as this new pronoun for the remainder of the story, just like how we use he and she to replace people's names when discussing someone, we establish who "he" or "she" is initially, and then just refer to them as he or she from then on. Make one version of "he" or "she" that just means "person" and move on.

If I am being insensitive or something please point it out so I can try to understand more but to me the debate of new pronouns is really silly because I only see people talking about things that can lead to further problems, I feel that my solution resolves the problem without singling anyone out.

 

[AT God]

I just realized I never mentioned the OP's idea in my big rant about pronouns.

I propose we start using new words for either gender or sex. So when talking about someones sex it's male or female, and when talking about gender it's gmale, fegmale or gnone. The floor is open for ideas/other nouns, preferably ones that are actually pronounceable..

What do you think?

I'm gonna spout some Psychology 100 level knowledge because I am on campus and feel I need to be doing something at least tangentially related to my psychology background. All of the following info is based on what I have learned in textbooks written by psychologists so if you disagree, be mad at Prentice Hall and other textbook companies.

"Sex" is the physical/biological aspect of a person. At its most precise level, it would be your chromosomes, XY or XX (deviations from this also exist but no real consensus is known on what to call them). Generally, your sex would reflect what you are born with unless you had some sort of surgery.

"Gender" is how you and society treat you, societal norms, etc. Basically anything but your mechanical/physical/biological aspects. That's why studying the difference between men and women is often called "gender studies". If it were sex studies, it would be focused on the physiological difference between men and women, gender studies focuses more about society and stuff.

The problem with our language isn't the lack of new terms, its that we as a society use the terms sex and gender interchangibly. I do it occasionally as well, despite knowing the difference between the two. I have filled out surveys that ask for participant gender and ones that ask for participant sex without having any intended difference in mind.

I think a lot of people's bickering over these terms comes from people not being aware of what they mean, not that the terms themselves are inadequate. And even if they understand them, some people disagree with their definition, believing sex and gender should mean the same thing when they technically do not. If you believed the two terms meant the same thing, you would effectively deny the existence of transgendered individuals because that designation comes from a mismatch between sex and gender.

K, back to learning. Sorry for ignoring the OP in my first posts.

 

[Yan007]

If you really wanted to, why not just use the Japanese honorific suffixes like -chan to imply "feminine" and -kun to imply "masculine"?

Example:
"female-chan"
"male-kun"

Maybe because chan and kun are not used for this reason?

 

[flying_whimsy]

The bigger issue I have with this is that labeling of this sort tends to lead to segregation and discrimination. Label what's different. Separate it. Victimize it. It doesn't matter if the intentions behind it are good, sooner or later someone will take advantage of it and use that minority status either as an excuse to attack that minority or use it as leverage against a non-member.

And as far as gender and sex goes: it's not that the labeling as it stands is the issue: it's that people are simply ignorant and overly sensitive on both sides. Compassion and patience will go a lot farther than anything else at this point.

 

[wizzy555]

I think a lot of people's bickering over these terms comes from people not being aware of what they mean, not that the terms themselves are inadequate. And even if they understand them, some people disagree with their definition, believing sex and gender should mean the same thing when they technically do not. If you believed the two terms meant the same thing, you would effectively deny the existence of transgendered individuals because that designation comes from a mismatch between sex and gender.

K, back to learning. Sorry for ignoring the OP in my first posts.

You are half right but at the same time hugely ignorant about how language evolves.

"Sex" and "gender" predate gender studies. Do you think the English in the middle ages acknowledged trans people?

Just because an academic decides to introduce a distinction does not mean the vernacular instantly changes. If people start using the new meaning, then that becomes the meaning (at least according to descriptive language theories).

 

[AT God]

You are half right but at the same time hugely ignorant about how language evolves.

"Sex" and "gender" predate gender studies. Do you think the English in the middle ages acknowledged trans people?

Just because an academic decides to introduce a distinction does not mean the vernacular instantly changes. If people start using the new meaning, then that becomes the meaning (at least according to descriptive language theories).

I cannot speak to the middle ages specifically but there are numerous historical examples of people who were transgendered in the past yes. Much like homosexuality people often reacted very negatively to them, at least in the examples I am aware of, I know there were some cultures that revered male to female trans people as being magical, being some omen about fertility and those date back centuries.

The difference between sex and gender has existed for many decades, I am not an etymologist so I have no idea what the true origin is but I have read studies that defined sex and gender as I did from the 1940's. As I mentioned, I think a lot of people are unaware there is a difference and we don't really talk about the difference in normal society. I was unaware sex and gender were different until I took a Psych 100 class at age 18. And I can say that if I had read it on the internet before hand, there's a good chance I would have assumed the internet was incorrect.

Also, I am generally speaking about how language is functioning as it is right now, I know language changes, I specifically discussed how I believe we should evolve our language, but I am not concerning myself with the centuries old history of terminology, at least not at the moment.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

As far as I knew (due to also being a student of Psychology and, formerly, of Sociology as well), sex is meant to be biological: your chromosomes. Your sex organs, whether they be testicles and penis for males or ovaries and vagina/uterus for women in most cases, are mostly a byproduct of a combination of said chromosomes and varying levels of testosterone and oestrogen. However, sex isn't just about chromosomes; otherwise, that'd invalidate the existence of intersexed and transgender individuals. Furthermore, the majority of people don't actually know their genetic sex - I'm a man and I've got a dick and a pair of balls, but for all I know, I could have XX and just not know about it until a urologist or someone picks it up when I'm trying to have a kid or something.

Now, your gender is a bit more vague, because depending on who you talk to, there's a distinction between gender - social constructs and/or what a person mentally identifies as (and how they identify as that is also a controversial topic - I don't know how many studies there have been on agender people or whatever, and we still don't know that much about gender and sex to know for sure why such anomalies happen) - and gender identity - which is basically what gender you 'feel' like.

Fuck if I know what being 'male' feels like, but maybe that's because I'm cis. I've never been on the other side of the fence, or experienced a life where I've been treated as a different gender for a large part of my life, but I can at least say that it's not something I think about that much consciously. I don't feel especially manly when I'm playing football because adrenaline or liking football is not unique to men, but I don't feel especially girly when I watch an episode or two of My Little Pony because I wanted to see what the fuss was about and it ended up being not that bad of a cartoon show when the only other stuff on TV is depressing news, shitty music videos, or reruns galore.

 

[Zaeseled]

Just do like us Finns do!
He = Hän
She = Hän

Gender nouns are dumb anyway :B

 

[DoPo]

If you really wanted to, why not just use the Japanese honorific suffixes like -chan to imply "feminine" and -kun to imply "masculine"?

Example:
"female-chan"
"male-kun"

Maybe because chan and kun are not used for this reason?

Yeah, thanks - I wasn't sure if I've been getting the entirely wrong idea when watching anime, or was that usage wrong.